It Can’t Happen Here
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Jack R. Nelson
Copyright 2012 Jack R. Nelson
Smashwords Edition
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IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE
The prediction abilities of our brains evolved to deal with the speeds and agilities of prey and predators, which are linear accelerations. But that was ages ago. Now we live in an era of exponential changes; those J-curved graphs pointing toward counterintuitive accelerations. We see the numbers but don’t believe them. We must force ourselves to think more clearly about future trends. Synergy means the behavior of whole systems not predicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.
Many of us, even young adults, hold to attitudes from fifty years ago, when the total population of the USA was under 180 million. Now we are over 311 million.. The general level of education - real literacy and critical thinking - has declined in that same time. Yet media penetration into every moment of our lives gives glib demagogues powerful access to this ignorant electorate.
Furthermore, complex societal ills like gangs and abandonment turn out hordes of young sociopaths. Fifty years ago they were scattered aberrations, now they are multitude, a subculture empowered by technology.
Fifty years ago in a world of three billion people the USA was The Superpower, the Soviet Union a third-world empire with nukes, and China floundering in the aftermath of the loopy Great Leap Forward.
Now the world’s population is more than doubled on a playing field that looks like the science fiction of fifty years ago. Things ain’t what they used to was. The synergies are changed. We must force ourselves to think more clearly about future trends.
My purpose in this essay is to address factors destabilizing the United States.
CONFUSION
This question began to focus for me in January of 2011.
1. On January 8 Jared Loughner ran amok in Tucson. We have not seen such a conspicuously lunatic mug shot in national media since Charles Manson. Yet the commentary was overwhelmingly political.
2. January 14, Los Angeles police officers killed a naked man in the street. Reginald Doucet Jr. The police report that Doucet attempted to take an officer’s gun. Doucet was shot twice, an apparent sufficiency.
3. January 18, Congressman Steve Cohen accused Republicans of chronic lying about health care. He compared the alleged lying campaign to the big lie methods used by Nazi propaganda master Josef Goebbels. More likely neither side has a monopoly on misinformation, but Cohen’s statements were greatly distorted by opinionated TV reporters. Hitler’s vile regime is so demonized that we can no longer use it for illustrative purposes, although its elements are in human nature and politics before him and after. North Korea, Khmer Rouge, Kosovo, Sudan, Rwanda...
4. Polls show about half of Republicans think President Obama is a Muslim and do not believe he is a citizen legally qualified to be President. The Republican leadership has consistently used weasel words to allay the ignorant. Leaving some wiggle room in order to keep these people on board, the leaders admit only a coyly qualified acceptance of Obama’s US citizenship and professed religion. This cynical manipulation is big lie methodology.
5. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives features public readings of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, treating them as if they were Holy Writ rather than a working plan for consensual government. Many haven’t sufficient prose or grammar to parse the meanings, and promote interpretations distant from the scholarly work of Constitutional argument.
The US Constitution is the oldest and most successful of its type, and a great work of the human spirit. But human products are imperfect, and like any of them the Constitution can be distorted and misused. For example, George W. Bush did not win the vote in 2000. Rather, his opportunistic party and family manipulated legal institutions and personal connections until the President of the Senate, Al Gore…yeah, him…applied parliamentary procedure to quash Senators’ last-ditch efforts which would have provoked a true Constitutional crisis had Gore been willing to continue the electoral fight at such a cost.
So...? Is there more than a general connection here; a uniting theme? My epiphany came when I was discussing the Doucet shooting with my mother. She felt sure there must be good reason for the police to kill a naked man. Very innocently, she said, “Well, you have to respect authority.” I agree that naked or clothed, it is beyond foolhardy to attack armed officers, but that was not her point. She was talking from a viewpoint of automatic credence and even reverence due to authority figures.
CRAZED AND IN CHARGE
The sociopath is a special kind of crazy; a creature without conscience, motivated by amoral and remorseless self interest. They are manipulators, and we are mere markers in their game. Estimates say 1% to 5% of the population is sociopath. Some of them are simply criminals. Some go into politics and work acceptably because it suits their purpose; gaining power and self-aggrandizement. Adolf Hitler rose to power through plurality in democratic elections, legal manipulations of state institutions, and militarized thugs. A main lubricant for his insane agenda was the good German folk’s acceptance of vested authority’s inherent correctness.
I could see my mother, and millions of Americans like her, as Good Germans.
The intelligent sociopath quickly detects your mental state and emotional buttons. Civility, empathy and conscience are learned behaviors. The sociopath is not diverted from his objectives by these feelings, even though he can mime them. They can be compelling characters, with that glow of supreme self-confidence. With the sociopath, you must always remember you are dealing with a reptile in human guise, only pretending genuine human emotions. Hitler was said to be a most charming fellow when it suited him.
Where is this going? Lunatics shooting and shot, confusion of fact and opinion in high office and in the media, fundamentalist fervors, a naïve electorate, cynical manipulations, angry polarizations, vulnerable institutions …Americans feel threatened on so many fronts, and yet like the Good Germans in 1934, few would recognise tyrany’s ascendency.
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE
An overthrow already happened in the election of 2000. The subsequent lies, incompetence, cronyism and corruption of George W. Bush’s White House were the sleazy work of small-minded men. Dumbstruck in a schoolroom on 9/11? New Orleans? Iraq? We got off easy. Using the same machinations as the 2000 Bush campaign, a genius sociopath would collapse our Republic, like Hugo Chavez and his democratic charade in Venezuela. Or like Josef Goebbels and Adolf Hitler in Germany. Or any ruthless group with ideological imperatives.
Do you think Federal authority could not be turned on the people? Do you remember National Guard troops killing students at Kent State? World War II prison camps in the Nevada desert cannot be dismissed as ancient history or a special case. American citizens were rounded up and effectively dispossessed without due process. Where is the Supreme Court? Consider the decision allowing State expropiation of your home just to sell it to developers who promise to pay more taxes, or the decision that anonymous immortal corporations have the same rights as us living persons. Madison and Jefferson surely spin in their graves.
We face multiple tipping points. The news in early 2012 is not encouraging, with sabres rattling in the Mideast and the Euro trembling on the precipice of default. Think of something like the Tea Party on steroids after several years of extrapolated current events; religious PACs, withering industry, local and state government bankruptcies, mega-unemployment, spreading poverty, homeless camps, transnational gangs, humiliating military entanglements, terrorism. When a society is fearful, confused, angry, the people look for a leader who by force of character will put things right. They turn away from critical reasoning and want quick emotionally satisfying answers.
Charisma is a common characteristic of dangerous sociopaths, because they are so focused and willful. Imagine a charismatic President and new majority of Congress coming in on a wave of fundamentalist, nationalist, populist law-and-order angst, with racist subtexts. Our new President Psycho would begin by appointing his own Heydrichs and Himmlers to run the FBI, ATF, Secret Service, Border Patrol and other armed federal authorities. They would be duly confirmed by Congress, perhaps with some arm-twisting, and at first most citizens would be satisfied with the new discipline.
Leaders like Saddam Hussein identify and empower the sociopaths, from street police to cabinet ministers.. Take your East LA gang lieutenant, put a suit on him, tell him he's immune as long as he's loyal to a draconian rule-set not much different from what has enforced his gang-loyalty since childhood. Soon the personnel who are not with the new Administration are forced out and the armed Federal policing branches change style.
Bingo, you got your Brown Shirts. Then Congress, the Supreme Court, Governors, state legislatures, the media and anyone with family and vulnerabilities would be brought to heel by these thousands of thug officers and agencies like the IRS and NSA.
CHAIRMAN MAO AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT
And so, I am led reluctantly to the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, and to the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The Preamble says we have the right to throw down a tyrant. The logical corollary of the Preamble is the equipment to back it up. Our Bill of Rights says you can own and carry weapons. Constitutional lawyer/professor Barak Obama supports the closely reasoned traditional interpretation, that the “well regulated militia” phrase does not limit that right to narrow militia purposes. This broad Constitutional guarantee of the right to arm ourselves is unique in all the world.
This is, as they say, serious as a heart attack. It is not merely hypothetical. Mao Tse Tung said political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The rationale for rejecting weapons registration is that government control would make rounding up any armed opposition too easy. Likewise limits on caliber and ammo; a .22 varmint rifle and a single box of shells would not be much in opposition to government goons. Therefore, Americans can accumulate military grade weapons and stockpile ammunition. This exposes us to the Jared Loughners.
Does it have to be that way? Could we have a more common-sense approach to gun regulation? What about the revolution in Egypt, by people armed with iPhones? Unfortunately we Americans aren’t like that. Despite our high-minded traditions, in conflict we are characterized by our NFL football, a contest of split-second teamwork and bone-breaking aggression. We are already armed and dangerous.
IT’S PEOPLE, NOT GUNS
And yet there is more to this than potential tyranny, more than weapons regulation. We need to identify the causes of our malaise and work on remedies, because the whole picture ties together. Synergy.
American prisons produce career criminals. It’s like being caged among rival wolf packs. No. Worse...chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins, known to exterminate rival bands.
With 5% of world population in the US, we have about 25% of the reported prisoners. Only countries like Russia and Belarus, at under 600 prisoners per 100,000 population, approach our Number One Imprisonment Rate of 715 per 100K. Canada or Australia or Germany, countries we would like to see as comparable for order, democracy and justice, are way down the list at 95 to 115 per 100K. The figures are even more skewed on race, with about 25% of American black males being jailed at some time. These numbers are so anomalous, so off the scale, clearly something is awry in the Land of the Free.
Drug addiction, single mothers, gangs, poverty, school drop-outs; these are symptoms, not causes. Moralistic scolding is fatuous nonsense. Yes, there are exceptional altruists and genuine success stories. But societies as a whole are driven by innate human response to economic realities of food, shelter, safety and pleasures. People act on expectations of outcome.
And what can we expect? Under the tax and regulatory frameworks of the last 30 years, the creation of wealth has progressively become a casino of abstract money instruments concentrating riches in an ever smaller circle of insiders. It is perhaps unfairly pejorative if taken personally, but as a class they are the insiders.
Political lobbying gives us unequal trade agreements decimating American industry, to the benefit of those same insiders. For the bottom 20% of workers, inflation-adjusted real wages have gone down. Other modern countries provide health care for everyone at half the overall national cost of our shameful profit-for-insurers partial coverage. Self-justifying indifference Balkanizes society into classes of I-got-mine, and can’t-get-there-from-here.
And we as a nation are not investing in our future. In 1960, about 20 percent of the Federal budget was for the health, development and education of young Americans. Today it's 10 percent and falling. Likewise science, infrastructure and energy. As China, South Korea and Germany invest in their futures, again insider Americans will reap globalized benefits.
Job loss was already bad before the insiders’ mortgage game collapsed; now millions of Americans are desperate. Statistics give us a cold image without their anguish. It is not a black and white picture; rather it is a sliding scale adding many more to those who never saw a way to the good life outside of gangs, crime and drug trafficking.
THE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR TERRORISM SUBSIDIES
America's failed War on Drugs is a central contributor to these multiplexed problems. It is the most pernicious stupidity in American policy. It is a failure like alcohol prohibition was, and for the same reasons. Eighty years ago prohibition profits made simple mafias into international businesses.
Today illegal drugs and the legitimate businesses captured through cash laundering are at least 1% of the world economy. Some estimates are much higher. This is huge. What could a smart crocodile do with a billion dollars tax free? Does it surprise us that this enormous market should make gang-life a growth industry for people sinking in poverty and no honest jobs?
High school civics class and the American Dream, where’s that at? From Toronto to Sao Paulo, Seattle to Miami, the savage Salvatruchas, the Jamaican posse gangs, Zeta, and others introduce kids to a ferocious lifestyle. The kids feel they have two options; join or die. If they are jailed, it is like a scholarship to Crime University. We create sociopath swarms in a subculture that values and rewards them.
Drug money destabilizes struggling democracies and their economies, causing yet more problems like illegal immigration. And billions of untraceable cash dollars go to our very worst enemies; the FARC, Al Qaeda, Taliban, and similar monsters.
GOING DOWN ENTWINED
Prohibition does not work, not to mention wasting our nation's police and military in this foolish campaign. Whether drugs are bad or badder or neither is immaterial. The point is that we are squandering scarce resources on a concept that already was proved a failure eighty years ago. According to the analysts, after a trillion dollars and forty years of War on Drugs, price is down, purity is up, availability up.
There is no evidence that decriminalization would cause a net increase in addiction. Dope is readily available to whomever wants it. The issue therefore is not availability, but causes of addiction.
Tobacco and alcohol are psychoactive drugs; all drugs like them must be under the umbrella of regulations and taxation, out of the underworld. They are in fact cheap products which support huge mark-ups, whether taxes in the case of the legal drugs or untaxed profit for the traffickers and terrorists.
Not counting judicial and prison costs, the US federal, state, and local governments spend at least 40 billion dollars annually on drug persecution. The foregone tax revenue is estimated at near 80 billion. These are probably conservative estimates. I have been unable to find out if they include US military interdiction costs. So we are talking about more than 120 billion dollars per year. And the real effective sum would be far more, upon exchanging wasteful expenses for a positive revenue stream. It could go a long way toward education, jobs, health, and community programs.
This would actually make a difference to the causes of addiction. The whole picture includes growing poverty, social milieu, hopeless disdain, HIV, children in criminal gangs, gun crimes, international terrorism, sex slavery, illegal immigration, prison crowding, racketeering, corruption, shaky democracies, weapons trafficking, the heinous massacre in Tamaulipas, and more cascading calamities.
These are not separate issues. Rather, they combine effects as dope and guns and enormous cash flow move organically, feeding off social damage done by the legal but dysfunctional tax and finance rule-set. Synergy.
We have two intertwined economies and societies; the drugs/gang system and the tax code/finance/insiders’ system, both running toward societal breakdown. We must redirect the money.
Drugs must be decriminalized, regulated, licensed, and taxed. Take them away from the world’s criminal/terrorist economy. Finance and the tax code must aim toward real wealth and jobs, new industries, sustainable agriculture, the American tax-base, and not toward heedless avarice. Wealth is good, ambition is good; we just need to change the game so wealth accrues to production and creativity rather than sterile manipulations.
WHILE ROME BURNS
It’s difficult to make these truths understandable to people who don’t already get it. Our Congressional leaders are more ideological than rational, discussing illegal drugs as if some kind of moral line in the sand while sipping highballs and puffing cigarettes. Anyhow, pandering to ignorant voters is easier than convincing them to support policies based on science and statistics. We are already an international laughingstock for the science teaching policies in benighted Kansas and Texas.
As a nation we are playing with fire. Should present trends continue, we will have nostalgic policy driven by hacks and hyenas using misguided patriots to front for them. Their short-sighted agenda will not cope with energy/environment costs, global warming, epidemics, water shortages and other issues more fundamental than political.
Cutting investments for science, education and infrastructure, we will fall behind competing nations. Addiction to foreign oil will bleed us out in wars and debt. Failed drug and immigration policies will unbalance cities already collapsing in abandoned neighborhoods. Squatters, marauders, scavengers, freak tribal gangs...The hacks and hyenas won’t care about any of it. Policy and Patriots are just playing pieces in their personal game plans.
Frightened and disgusted voters will seek a charismatic leader to “make the trains run on-time”.
This is my worst-case scenario; a fascist (not to be confused with Nazi) takeover of the Government by an alliance of ideologues, enablers and predators. Not that the majority would envision a tyranny, but opportunists -- the sociopaths; the predators, the hyenas -- would seize the moment.
Then, armed conflict spreading across the country.
If you don’t learn the lessons of history you will be forced to repeat them.
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About the author: Jack Nelson lives in the Galapagos Islands since 1967. He owns a SCUBA dive tour operation there. Jack writes about Galapagos issues in Spanish. When in California, he drives a 1962 Chevy Nova hot rod, and writes of his fun and thoughts in the car.
Other ebook essays by Jack Nelson:
Hitch Hiking From Panama http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/125974
Hot Rod Nova Track Day http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/126294
Highway Dinosaur http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/127462
Galápagos Pioneers http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/130019
Dolphins and Whales (free) http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/128769
Bullfighting & Evolution http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/134307